| The sun'll come out tomorrow |
[Oct. 12th, 2008|08:30 pm] |
|
Looks like the Nikkei is up about 9%. Hopefully, our markets will follow. |
|
|
| More flower porn |
[Oct. 12th, 2008|06:37 pm] |
Berkeley Botanical Gardens special edition of Flower Porn:
 |
|
|
| Definition of "sexism".... |
[Oct. 12th, 2008|08:13 pm] |
|
You just know that if Pelosi weren't a woman, there's no fucking way she'd keep the Speaker's chair, regardless of the outcome of the elections..... |
|
|
| You know, if it was so damn important to America.... |
[Oct. 12th, 2008|08:12 pm] |
Why doesn't Congress come back into session before the elections to debate a new stimulus package?
(hat tip Kim). |
|
|
| last spam of the day: work for Mozilla! |
[Oct. 12th, 2008|05:01 pm] |
Mozilla's IT/Operations team, the group responsible for the infrastructure that powers all of our sites (and coincidentally the group I work for), is currently looking for a Network Engineer.
I'm happy to provide details, but in general, we're looking for someone who knows network stuff really well (we do have data centers on three continents plus offices, etc) but is also interested in systems administration. There's a lot of variety to the work this position entails. :)
Anyway, you don't have to be local to California to apply or be interested, either. We have really good benefits, competitive pay, all that good stuff. I'm happy to chat about the position and details, just ping me.
Comments screened or you can find me on various IM services or via email if you have questions or are interested. |
|
|
| Tough day at work |
[Oct. 12th, 2008|03:49 pm] |
In the midst of the KB's recap of last night's Canucks game, this bit about baseball:
A text message from my buddy Scott, who was watching the baseball game: "Wish I could be a situational lefty pitcher, get called in to face one lefty batter, walk him, and call it a day." |
|
|
| contact report |
[Oct. 12th, 2008|03:10 pm] |
Been doing contacts for over a week. The doctor has played some with the prescription in my right eye (my dominant eye). Technically I think the eye is at -3.75, but there's a magnitude 0.5 astigmatism in that eye.
Right now, I'm using normal soft lenses. I.e., not correcting for the astigmatism. Originally we were using a -4.00 lens, both to make it more convenient (my left eye is -4.00 with no astigmatism, it'd be more convenient to share the same lens type), and to try to correct for the astigmatism by overpowering the eye. (Apparently a common trick for minor astigmatisms like mine.)
Anyway, it was causing me to get some headache type symptoms and it was still somewhat hard to see with that eye the way it is. The doctor lowered me to the "real" prescription for that eye, which has mostly resolved the headache issue (almost, still minor) but vision is somewhat more problematic now. My right eye is a lot (relatively) more fuzzy than my left. It's only really noticeable when I'm on the computer, though, out and about in the world they're close enough not to really matter.
I'm not quite sure what to do. The doctor said my astigmatism versions of contacts don't really start until magnitude 0.75 so I'm not quite there yet, not to mention toric lenses (the kind that correct for astigmatism) are a lot more fussy than regular lenses. They have to be positioned just so, etc. Not really the kind of thing I want to be messing with if I can avoid it.
I think I'll just keep plugging along with my current -4.00/-3.75 combination of regular soft lenses and see if I adjust. I think I probably will be fine given some time for my brain to get used to not being able to use the right eye quite as much for detail work. I hope, anyway. |
|
|
| Harrah's pulling Megabucks from LV properties |
[Oct. 12th, 2008|01:30 pm] |
Today's Question of the Day (link only valid today[1]) at the Las Vegas Advisor web site is: "I understand that all of Harrah's Casinos in Vegas are pulling IGT Megabucks Progressive machines. What casinos in Vegas still have those progressive slots? How often do they actually hit?"
The first part is interesting. I wonder if Harrah's is pulling them nationwide in response to Harrah's AC being sued over a different IGT jackpot, but the question mentions LV only. The answer says that LVA contacted various Harrah's slot departments and found that they had all pulled all their Megabucks machines or reduced down to one or two left.
There is also an update from a reader: "About your QOD for 10/12/08. All Harrah's properties are in the process of eliminating "Participation" slot machines, where Harrah's leases the machine from the manufacturer and has to share the profits with them." [Ed: If that's the case, then a lot of your other favorite games may be disappearing from Harrah's casino floors.]"
So the bean-counting deterioration of Harrah's continues...
[1] They have archives, but they're only open to paying members |
|
|
| web 2.0 + email |
[Oct. 12th, 2008|10:07 am] |
Is it just me or do so-called Web 2.0 sites spend an inordinate amount of time emailing you to say "hey! don't forget about us!"
I know that part of Web 2.0 is that feeling of being connected, of not having to think or worry about missing something. But I'm starting to feel that is, what is the phrase, "lipstick on a pig." It's still spam mail!
For example, I use Mint.com to do some financial analysis of spending habits and the like. Yet every time there's a fee (ATM Fee, Savings Transfer Fee, whatever), they send me an email "Oooh fees suck and you got hit with one!" They also send me weekly wrap-up emails and other emails letting me know certain things have cleared. They've also decided to email me when my credit cards (all two of them) are due, but I don't need that.
I'm certain there are ways to tell them to stop doing this in the settings. But then we roll back to the argument of opt-in vs. opt-out. Kind of annoying to have to figure out which buttons to tick to have it stop pissing emails at me every day.
Your thoughts? Are these Web 2.0 Wunderkind way too email happy? |
|
|
| Question for you econ experts |
[Oct. 12th, 2008|10:27 am] |
|
So what happens if the net liabilities of all banks in the world are greater than the net assets? How close are we to this? |
|
|
| Day 3 -- Hockey Day in Toronto |
[Oct. 12th, 2008|11:11 am] |
Adam, Shawn Buchanan and I got into The Centre of the Universe (as Toronto is known to the rest of Canada) around 3:30 PM. Walked to the Hockey Hall of Fame and was fascinated by the awesome Canadiana, but when we discovered the interactive games (and, of course, the associated prop betting), we wish we had found them earlier so we could have played them more.
There were two main games of interest, a shooting game and a goaltending game. Both games were sort of mechanical virtual reality games with real sticks and foam pucks; in the shooting game you had to pick the corner on the goalie, and the goaltending game fired pucks out of any of about six slots which you had to stop.
Pads? We don't need no stinkin' pads.
Adam has a surprisingly good wrist shot for a man of his many advanced years and took down the shooting game with relative ease. I was very confident I would win the goaltending game though, having played a ton of goalie in street clothes over the years. I was surprised by the first two shots, but then found my form. Both Adam and I stopped three of five so we had to chop Shawn's money. I was disappointed not to win, but at least I did wow the crowd with a pretty ridiculous glove save on the fourth shot.
It was getting close to game time, and we had agreed to meet five other guys at Wayne Gretzky's bar, and then off to the game. On the walk to Air Canada Centre, I laid Gavin Smith $600 to win $500 on Montreal, and also took over 5.5 goals against Adam. That marked the end of my my bad prop bet run, as I had what was certainly my best hockey prop betting day in history. Gavin ran like ass in hockey prop betting. My favourite was the $100 "next icing" bet we had: after we made the bet, both teams somehow went well over 15 minutes of play without an icing call, at which point I suggested to Gavin we double the bet since it had been so long. Less than 20 seconds later, the Habs tossed it down the ice under pressure with just enough weight for the puck to barely make it over the goal line ahead of the defenceman. There's no question the linesman should have waived off the icing, but that's just how bad Gavin ran. Ship the $200!
There was also lots of silliness between periods. I also made $400 on showdown Omaha where everyone just got four cards and dealt.
Possibly the first hand of 2-7 Chinese ever dealt at the Air Canada Centre
But unquestionably, this was the highlight of the night:
GOlf, Leaves, GOlf! |
|
|
| Inf vs. Def |
[Oct. 12th, 2008|09:31 am] |
Ok, I give up. I dont know.
Deflation - credit shrinking, overcapacity in everything (except energy maybe), assets prices shrinking, etc - thus cash is king.
Inflation - FED and the rest of 'em succeed and print their way out of it? Then, we should go lever ourselvesup to the hilt while (if) we can and buy gazillion houses or something.
Which brings me back to overcapacity of houses and "somethings".
Guns, ammo and whisky perchaps? |
|
|
| |
[Oct. 12th, 2008|12:57 am] |
Holy crap. I just got a banner ad from the Mormon church. No kidding! Somebody's ad vendor can't target for shit.
OTOH, they're offering me a free copy of the Book of Mormon. Maybe I should... wonder what mailing lists I'd wind up on?
OK, I clicked. I wound up on this page. Check out creepy eyebrow girl and the neckless dude. Click the link on the left and you can request missionaries to bring you a free book or DVD. |
|
|
| Dammit to hell and halfway back |
[Oct. 11th, 2008|11:38 pm] |
This afternoon I got an invitation to dinner on the house at Mono, the wonderful restaurant in my building.
When I got there, I heard the news that didn't surprise me but that I didn't want to hear: this was their last night. The economy kicked them in the ass pretty hard, and it didn't make sense to stay open any longer.
Damn. Damn damn damn damn damn. If I could fund them through the economic mess, I would. Dammit.
Todd pulled out all the stops, and it was a wonderful meal with great food, great company, and lots of wine. I haven't been this buzzed since BARGE, though I'm pretty sure I'm spelling most of my words correctly as I type this. |
|
|
| The Onion rewards regulars with an in-joke |
[Oct. 11th, 2008|11:27 pm] |
I haven't been reading *all* of the "Historical Archives" series they've got going on (a lot of them are funny, but it gets a bit tedious after a while, and there's only so much time I can waste at work)... the third item here made me genuinely laugh out loud. |
|
|
| Woot! |
[Oct. 11th, 2008|10:05 pm] |
Great comeback, although I could understand if the Flames feel a bit irked by the officiating. The boarding call late on Bertuzzi seemed soft (although he did shove him), but consistent with the fairly tight standards they had for most of the game. Of course, then Burrows doesn't get called for tripping in OT. Heckuva game-winner though -- Demitra was almost past the goal line when he put it in.
Man, I hope Bieksa isn't going to be one of those cursed with bad injury luck.
I may have to make a STFUC icon to go with the STFUM one. Please tell us again how you can't score from behind the net so they shouldn't follow the Sedins back there. Oh, and did I mention they're twins? And they always know where each other is.
The NHL could really use a new ad agency. The "Is this the year?" campaigns are pretty lame, both the frozen photo one (note to NHL: when Crosby says "I never want to be in this photo again" there are *two* ways that statement could be true) and the one where it's just music played over a montage of photos of players from a single team ending with "For every goal there are thousands of assists." (Another one I saw said "18,200" instead of thousands, dunno how many versions there are.) Um, what are you trying to say? If you mean in the game, that's obviously silly. If you're talking about the fans, maybe you should include at least one photo of fans cheering?
The "on the road with Carrie Milbank" spots promoting the new nhl.com web site with stats etc. are fairly uninspired too. They should just say "see more of Carrie Milbank's breasts at nhl.com" -- it would certainly do a better job of driving traffic to the site.
But the golden raspberry goes to the "why is it called hockey and not puckey" self-promo for the NHL network. Someone must've seen this Yahoo Answers item and thought it would make a funny (one-minute-long!) commercial. They were wrong. I feel sorry for everyone who was involved with this fiasco.
The underlying message here is troubling -- while they did have some "regular" commercials for things like Progressive auto insurance etc., it seemed like by far the majority of the ads were the aforementioned NHL/NHL network stuff, which strongly smells like they're having trouble attracting advertisers. |
|
|
| Niagara Day 2: Are you smarter than a poker player? |
[Oct. 12th, 2008|12:05 am] |
Friday was a pretty quiet day, as we mostly just made plans for Saturday, which we're most excited about. We'll be going to be driving to Toronto, taking a trip to the Hockey Hall of Fame, as well as watching the Toronto Maple Leaves hopefully get trounced by the Montreal Canadiens.
Got up early for the breakfast buffet. Both today and yesterday we've tipped the (same) waiter $10 on our free breakfast meal. Definitely making this guy's day. But now we've set a dangerous precedent!
Put our names on the list for poker again, but once again neither of us felt like waiting around. So we spent most of the day hanging around, eating, and not doing too much in particular.
We talked a bunch about stripper trivia. At dinner (East Side Mario's), I hypothesized that your average waitress has to be smarter than your average stripper. Adam was skeptical, so as she brought our drinks, I asked her:
"How many sides does a hexagon have?"
"Hexagon? Six! 'Hex', duh..."
So far so good! A few minutes later, I asked her to name the three Axis powers from World War II. She had absolutely no idea. She said she is more of a math and science person. Interesting. Adam asked me what I thought of the question, "what element has the symbol Fe?"
I said there's no way she would know that, and bet him $20 at even-money. Next time she came over, he popped the question.
"Iron," she snap-called.
Fuck. The next one we thought of was planets in order from the sun. We discussed the line for a while and I was sure she knew. He talked me up to laying 80 to win 20, and I agreed. I popped the question.
"Oh, I have no idea!"
God, I suck. "How can you know that Fe is iron and not know the planets in the solar system?!"
"I don't know," she responded. "I'm only good at math and science!"
"This is science!" The tilt sets in.
"It's astronomy," she contested.
"Astronomy is science!"
"Well, it's not part of the science in school."
Those four questions (hexagon, Axis powers, Fe and the planets) ended up being the standard. We walked over to the casino and made various over/under bets on how many questions Gavin Smith (1-of-4, getting only iron), Joe Sebok (3-of-4, stating that a pentagon has ten sides), and a bunch of other people we recognized in the poker room we knew and recognized. Adam beat me all over the place. I'm just blown at the questions people are getting right and wrong. I figured Fe was a hard one and the planets one was easy. Turns out almost the exact opposite is true; almost everyone knows that Fe is iron, but most people weren't able to put the planets in order.
The cumulative score for people on Friday was something like 9-for-24. Additionally, it is alarming how many people think Germany and Great Britain were on the same side in World War II. Says Adam: "Man, we know a lot of dumb people."
Walked over to the poker room around 1 AM for food, and finally we were able to play poker without being on a massive waitlist. I played some shorthanded 25-50 NL and then some 10-20 when that broke. The game was definitely beatable by someone with patience. Someone not me. I was bored stupid. I just can't play live cash games well unless it's a really big game and the money means a lot to me.
It sucks, because I used to be the most disciplined pro I know. When I was starting out, whether I was grinding it out at 10-20 (limit) at the Holiday Inn or at 5-10 NL online, I was super-disciplined. I had a fantastic reputation for being completely tiltproof. The words "boredom call" were not in my vocabulary. Now when I play live cash, every hand looks great. I can cold-call raises with any stupid thing and rationalize it in any stupid way. Put simply, I'm just not hungry any more. Money has gone in and out of my hands like sand and nothing I can do in this session can matter, so I just get impatient and stupid.
I don't have the usual poker pro leaks: sports, house games, women or drugs, but is this really any different? I guess since I almost never play live, it's not a big deal. It's just an ego thing. I'm sure I could play my 100% best if I really tried, but I just don't feel the motivation.
But no matter. No poker tomorrow; just hockey! And then the big tournament on Sunday. I feel good, so don't bet against me. :) |
|
|
| News flash |
[Oct. 11th, 2008|09:20 pm] |
|
Dog bites man, I suck at poker. Took 2nd & 8th in our wsop year long satellite tourney. Got bluffed off a set (four flush on the board) and bluffed into a set. Fuck. Was in first overall after the first tourney, but 2-5 were still in when I left. At least I realized I was fucking tilted and skipped the cash games. |
|
|
| navigation |
| [ |
viewing |
| |
most recent entries |
] |
| [ |
go |
| |
earlier |
] |
| |
|
|
![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
resultsoriented's Friends Page